Memories of Who concert tragedy linger

Dec. 2, 2009

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Eleven concertgoers died trying to get into a Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum (now U.S. Bank Arena) on Dec. 3, 1979. Shoes and clothing torn from concertgoers in the crush to enter Riverfront Coliseum lay on the floor inside the arena. / Enquirer file photo

Vigil planned Thursday

A vigil to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Dec. 3, 1979, Who concert tragedy at Riverfront Coliseum will take place at 6:30 p.m. Thursday on the plaza of U.S. Bank Arena.

The vigil was organized by Kasey Ladd, whose mother, Teva Ladd, was killed at the concert when he was 2 years old; Patti Collins, wife of musician Bootsy Collins, and the Cincinnati USA Music Heritage Foundation; and Brian Powers, a music librarian at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

The vigil will include the lighting of 11 lanterns representing each of the victims and a candlelit walk from the plaza to Christ Church at 318 E. Fourth St. There will be music, speakers and opportunities for prayer and reflection at the church.

Thirty years later, on the open concrete plaza on the west side of U.S. Bank Arena, there is no hint of the tragedy that unfolded there on the night of Dec. 3, 1979.

Nothing marks the area where 11 young people died and scores more were injured as a tightly packed crowd of thousands tried to enter the few open doors of was then called Riverfront Coliseum to see The Who. Thousands of people have walked over the plaza since then not knowing how it looked that night: Strewn with winter coats, shoes, purses and broken bottles and illuminated by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles as paramedics tended to the injured and dead.

It is a night that many would like to forget. But others are determined that people know about what happened on the night of one of the worst concert disasters in history, the loved ones they lost and the sweeping changes in crowd and concert safety that followed.

Thursday, for the first time in nearly 30 years, a public vigil will take place on the plaza, followed by a walk to Christ Church at 318 E. Fourth St. for a brief memorial service.

One of the organizers is 32-year-old Kasey Ladd of Newtown, who was just 2 when his mother, Teva Ladd, died at the concert at age 27. He has no memories of her, only family members' stories of a music-loving young wife and mother of two.

"There's no marker there, no nothing there to remind people of what happened. I think that's long overdue," says Ladd, now a husband and father. "It's a dark light on our city's history, but it's something that shouldn't be forgotten and swept under the rug."

What happened that night was the result of a deadly combination of factors, numerous eyewitnesses have said over the years: What was known as festival seating, an insufficient number of security and staff, poor crowd management and too few doors that opened too late for thousands of excited fans.

The Who, scheduled to play the Super Bowl on Feb. 7 with its two remaining original members, was one of the supergroups of the late '70s, on par with Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. So it was big news when it was announced the Who would perform at Riverfront Coliseum in December 1979, the band's first Cincinnati performance in four years. All of the 18,348 tickets for the concert, which cost $10 each, sold out in 90 minutes. The majority of those tickets - more than 14,000 - were for unreserved seats and for festival seating.

Festival seating wasn't seating at all, but rather first-come, first-served, standing-room-only spots on the floor in front of the stage. With floor seats, the coliseum held 16,336; with no floor seats, it could hold more than 18,000. Festival seating was why the crowd started gathering early that Monday afternoon on the plaza of Riverfront Coliseum: To find the best possible spot to see one of the biggest bands in the world.

Among them were 17-year-old Ursuline Academy seniors and best friends Ellen Dearing (now Betsch) and Kim Enis (now Sullivan), huge Who fans who filled scrapbooks with articles and photos of the band and mailed them letters and Christmas cards.

They went to Riverfront Coliseum separately, after a squabble over the tickets and who would go with them. Kim and a group of guy friends she had met while campaigning for then-city councilman Jerry Springer had general admission tickets and arrived at about 4:30 p.m. Ellen and her friend Mary, who had tickets for reserved seats, arrived a couple of hours later.

Once they arrived, they found themselves hemmed in almost immediately by the thousands of fans crowded around the main gate at the west side of the coliseum. They were eager to get inside, and they were cold. The Western & Southern Financial Group time and temperature sign across from the coliseum read 26 degrees at 6:08 p.m., when Ellen's future husband, Greg Betsch - whom she didn't know at the time - arrived.

As 7 p.m. - the scheduled time for doors to open for the 8 p.m. show - passed, restless fans, some of whom could hear the band's sound check inside, began pounding on the glass doors.

"It was almost like the (staff) inside looked panicked, like they didn't know what to do," Ellen says. "(It looked like) if they opened too many doors, they thought they were going to get trampled or something."

Around the same time, Mark Simpson of West Chester Township, then a 16-year-old Lakota High School freshman, was standing right in front of the doors, wedged between a wall and an iron railing that is no longer there. He could feel the crowd growing more and more impatient that they couldn't get in the doors, which he was perplexed to find not yet open. Bottles began sailing above his head, shattering above the door frame and raining glass.

Then he saw a yellow jacket-clad coliseum employee approach the door he was standing in front of, unlock it and walk away.

"We're in trouble," he told his friend. "Take a deep breath."

Jammed into the railing, Simpson felt the breath being squeezed out of him. Then he shot through the doorway, fell down and scrambled to his feet, his chin bloodied and his shirt torn. Looking behind him, he could see people piling up in the doorway.

Further back in the crowd, Ellen - who was 5 feet, 2 inches tall and 90 pounds - felt herself being lifted off her feet and gasping for air. So did Kim.

At one point, Ellen saw her knit hat floating away from her over the top of the crowd before another young concertgoer grabbed and pulled it back on her head. Then her left arm slipped out of her orange-red, buttonless wool wrap coat. Later that night, she discovered an oily black footprint on the inside lining.

Ellen's friend Mary had been squeezed out to the side of the crowd, and she pulled Ellen out with her. As they neared the back of the crowd, they saw a group of maybe half a dozen men in their early 20s, throwing themselves into the back of the crowd to create huge human waves and laughing.

"It was like wheat bending," says Greg Betsch, then a 20-year-old junior at the University of Cincinnati. "You'd almost hit the ground and it would bounce back and throw you back."

With their tickets for reserved seats, Ellen and her friend waited for the crowd to pour through the doors, like a bathtub draining, before they walked in themselves.

She will never forget what she saw. Piles of shoes, mittens and coats. And a dark-haired young man lying face-up, sparkling because he was covered in broken glass. She doesn't know who he was, or whether he lived or died.

Later, Greg Betsch and his friend saw another young man on a stretcher, his face bright red.

But none of them knew until after they returned home to their panic-stricken families, that 11 people, ages 15 to 27, lost their lives that night. Each had suffocated in the crush of the crowd. The Who didn't find out until after the concert, either.

Teva Ladd was one of the victims. Her husband, Michael Ladd, 27, was standing right behind her in the crowd when he saw three doors open, and then two shut. She fell forward as the crowd surged, and he fell back. The next time he saw her, she was being pulled out of the crowd.

The concert became a personal nightmare for the concertgoers' families and a public relations nightmare for the city of Cincinnati and Riverfront Coliseum, with everyone denying fault for what happened.

In the weeks after the concert, families of the dead and injured filed 33 lawsuits against The Who; the promoter, Philadelphia-based Electric Factory Concerts; the city of Cincinnati; and coliseum management. The suits claimed negligence and sought more than $100 million in damages. All were settled out of court by July 1984 for a total of $2.1 million, plus an undisclosed sum for the family of one victim, 18-year-old Peter Bowes of Wyoming. No case ever went to trial, and no one was ever charged with a crime.

But significant changes in the concert industry followed, locally and nationally.

The day after the concert, Paul Wertheimer, the city's first public information officer, volunteered to lead a task force on crowd control and safety. At 29, just two years older than the oldest victim, he says he was determined to make some good come of the tragedy.

The task force spent six months preparing a more than 90-page document, which contained more than 100 recommendations. The city had already enacted many of those in the weeks following the concert, including a ban on festival seating. It remained in place in Cincinnati for 25 years, except for when the city granted a controversial exemption for a 2002 Bruce Springsteen concert at U.S. Bank Arena.

In the hopes of attracting more big-name performers, the city permanently repealed the ban in August 2004. It has adopted the National Fire Protection Association's standards for festival seating, which put an end to the days when concert promoters and venues could pack as many people as possible into standing-room only spaces. Local law now dictates that festival seating must allow 9 square feet per person, and the number of such tickets sold varies depending on the stage setup, says U.S. Bank Arena spokesman Sean Lynn. Venues with festival seating also must submit written safety plans to public safety agencies for approval.

Just 1,500 general admission tickets were sold for the first concert to include festival seating after the city lifted the ban, an October 2004 performance by pop-punk band Green Day. Doors opened two hours before showtime, and general admission ticketholders entered the venue through a separate entrance. General admission tickets have been sold to nine other concerts at U.S. Bank Arena since then, running the musical gamut from Metallica to Taylor Swift.

Wertheimer served on the technical committee that helped develop the National Fire Protection Association's standards. He had never wanted to make a career out of injury and death. But every time he heard news reports of deaths in crowds at concerts and other large events, he grew angry that some people still hadn't learned from what happened in Cincinnati in 1979.

In 1992, he founded Crowd Management Strategies, a Los Angeles-based consulting company. He made recommendations to improve crowd safety in the aftermath of other disasters, including the 2003 fire at the Great White concert, in Rhode Island that killed 100, he has been dubbed rock's Ralph Nader and the marshal of the mosh pit, where he has spent dozens of hours himself. The company's Web site, www.crowdsafe.com, includes the Cincinnati task force's landmark 1980 report, which has served as a model for hundreds of other communities.

"I could never shake the impact that the Who tragedy had on me," he says.

Neither could the survivors.

Ellen Dearing Betsch, now a 47-year-old senior engineering technician at Greater Cincinnati Water Works, developed long-lasting problems with claustrophobia and was prescribed Valium to cope with it.

She hasn't worn the coat she wore to the concert since that night, but she can't bring herself to throw it away. Packed in a closet in her Mount Airy home, it is a tangible reminder that she could have lost much more than her coat that night.

"I just hope, so much, that people don't forget what happened, they don't forget every little detail of what happened," she says, "so that the lessons stay current in people's minds, so that other people won't lose loved ones like this."

Michael Ladd tried to forget. He says he drank himself into a frenzy after the concert, lost his job, wrecked a brand-new motorcycle and set the house where he once lived with Teva on fire. After an uncle told him he needed to straighten out for the sake of his two children, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, got another job and remarried.

Thirty years later, he still finds that night difficult to talk about. The first time his son heard his father's story was when he told it to WVXU-FM (91.7), in a piece that aired Sunday night.

He still worries that more people will be killed or injured in crowds, especially his kids, who love live music just as much as their parents did.

But they, too, have learned the lessons of that night. Kasey Ladd went to see a Phish concert last month at U.S. Bank Arena. As soon as he sat down in his reserved seat, he did what he usually does every time he sees a concert there.

He took out his cell phone, called his father and told him he was all right.